Celebrity Isn’t Everything, Mrs. Angel

My mother comes home. I pour her a cup of black coffee with cinnamon and nutmeg, and perch on the back of the couch while she shakes rain out of her short, silky hair and shrugs out of her tailored leather jacket. She’s wearing chocolate brown slacks and a russet cashmere sweater.

Perched in my hole-ridden jeans and white tank top splattered with blue and green paint, it must amaze her that an elegant woman such as herself could ever have wound up with a ragamuffin daughter.

“Did dinner go well?” I ask her, as she takes her coffee and reaches out to tuck a black, stray strand of hair back into my braid.

“Not quite,” she answers, but she’s smiling at me. “I always love cooking for Jennifer and Cris. Helping out. But sometimes I tire of your fan club.”

I laugh. “Who?”

My mother shrugs and sits down on the couch, slipping off her boots and stretching her long legs (how did I wind up only 5’3”?!) along the cream-colored cushions. “Oh, a college student who wants an internship. Cris kept asking about his communication skills and he kept talking about Mardi Gras.”

“Guess that’s his answer,” I chuckle.

“Jennifer mentioned that I was your mother–obviously my singular claim to fame–”

“And your cooking, and beauty, and theological brilliance, and crazy skills as a CCG player, and—”

“I’ve already completed my Christmas shopping, darling. Your Wii is already wrapped.”

I zip it.

She continues, “He just had to know everything about you. What college. What degree. Your birthday. Your cell phone number—”

“Mom!”

“—What raves you’ve attended. What ferry you take. What color your motorcycle is.”

“Mom!!”

She winks at me. I glare.

She squeezes my hand gently. “Sweetheart, very few people under the age of forty, or outside the realm of celebrity, are going to understand your desire for privacy. Drawing a dozen or even a hundred authors and designers into Mardi Gras isn’t going to stop people from wanting to meet *you.*”

I narrow my eyes. “You didn’t...”

She smirks. “What?”

I groan and collapse along the back of the couch. I can just imagine her growing more and more annoyed by the would-be intern’s rapid fire questions I’ve forbidden her to answer until, finally, in desperation to save her sanity, she plays her only trump card. The picture of me in her wallet.

When I was four.

At Halloween.

Dressed as a teddy bear.

A...

Pink...

Teddy bear.

“Come on, sweetheart,” she stands and pats my head in a way that I know I’m right. “I’ll beat you at a few rounds of Mardi Gras.”

Insult on top of injury. She's one mean mother.

E.J.

Ticket to Fly

Standing, at midnight, at the window overlooking the ink black Puget Sound, I imagine I am you, a world away from America, I close my eyes and grow five inches taller, more than twenty years older.

You speak proudly of your home, built by you and your mother when you were eight. No electricity but running water, which was rare in the area. You speak confidently of your path in life, Shepherd Lauriat, an impassioned road that you walk with God. You speak gently of your love for my mother, unshaken, unbroken, a constant for almost half a century. You are without doubt, worry or shame. Your God has no room for shame.

Solin? If I buy your plane ticket, will you bring your God to America?

I’m not sure who is killing us faster: The foreign extremists who hate us for our “opulent liberalism” or the native extremists who feel the same way. One set of terrorists take our lives. The other set takes our God. Without God, we are desolate and alone.

In the spring of 2005, when the first crocuses pushed into the cold, fresh air, a friend of mine attempted suicide. He left a note behind for God. He grieved. He was so sorry. But he could no longer live a lie. Alone in the world, no family, no partner, few friends, he had devoted his time to scripture, to art, to writing. His God, seen only through a mirror darkly, was a God of shame. Of fighting every thought, impulse and emotion. And at twenty-one years old, after eight years of actively fighting himself, Jared had had enough of shame. It would be better, he thought, to end his life, than to disappoint his God.

You wouldn’t disappoint Solin’s God, Jared. It was Solin’s God who sent Jay and Mike, then strangers, twenty year old Mormons on their mission, to your door that day, to glimpse you through the window, break the glass and call 911. It was Solin’s God who blessed you with Jay, still in your life to this day, and for forever.

When you bow your head in prayer, He is already there; He has been waiting for you all day. And shame isn’t in His vocabulary.

Happy first anniversary, my friends. God bless.

E.J.

Musing on the Divine

From: Christian Bloggers
To: ejangel@windstormcreative.com
Cc: Christian Bloggers
Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 5:08 AM
Subject: Invitation to Join Christian Bloggers

Dear blog author:

We recently came across your site, ejangel.blogspot.com, while searching for fellow Christian bloggers.

A small group of us have started a new site called Christian Bloggers. Our prayer and intent is to bring Christians closer together, and make a positive contribution to the Internet community. While many of us have different "theologies," we all share one true savior.

Would you be interested in joining Christian Bloggers? Please take a few minutes to have a look at what we are trying to do, and if you are interested, there is a sign up page to get the ball rolling. We would greatly appreciate your support in this endeavor.

May God Bless you and your blogging efforts. We look forward to hearing from you.

Craig Cantin
Christian Bloggers
info@christian-bloggers.com
www.chritian-bloggers.com

Okay. I admit it. I almost deleted this message. The truth of the matter is, I thought it was spam at first glance... and at second glance.

I *want* to believe the best about people. I *want* to accept first and doubt only after cause. But, to be honest, in this day and age, that can be hard sometimes. A lot of times. I was about to delete the message as spam when I gave it another chance and a quick read. I found myself frowning and squinting my eyes. Hm. Christian, huh? What *kind* of Christian? I surfed on over to their website.

Interestingly enough, it wasn’t the site itself that really grabbed me. They’re new and their mission is admirable, but the thing that grabbed me were the ads. I know. Strange, right? Who really pays attention to those little text banners at the top of a webpage? Ads are just a necessary evil, right? But the three ads at the top of the site that night amazed me. One was for Christian outreach to teens. The other two were for GLBT Christian groups. Now the site is not a teen site or a GLBT site, but when they wrote in their email to me that they bring all "theologies” together, it obviously wasn’t lip service.

Once again, I find myself shaking my fist at mankind (and bowing my head for answers) over the corruption of God and Christianity as a whole by hate-mongering, hypocritical fanatics. Their God is not my God. I’m not even entirely certain that their God exists.

Admittedly, in terms of religion, I’m not much one for “hey, whatever works for you is cool.” I think there are a lot of spiritual paths that are hugely, massively detrimental to the mental health of the practitioners and, in some cases, even to the lives of nonbelievers, I’m pretty much all for deconstruction and recruitment. However, if someone tells me they’re down with turn the other cheek, righteous anger, impassioned path, and the ten commandants, I can abide.

That leaves a *lot* open. Wide open for individuals to talk *directly* to God. To ask him their own hard questions. To search themselves, with His guidance, for what is right for them, the world, their children.

And I’m not just talking about some great websites where GLBT Christians can feel at home. I have never brought questions of my own sexuality to God. I’m cool with my sexuality. But I have brought *my* hard questions to God. My hard questions might be someone else’s givens. Things that might seem petty to someone else. In the way that I think it’s ridiculous that if two women fall in love and stay together to raise a family in a safe, positive, monogamous relationship they’re going to hell.

I think about God quite a bit during these times. But I suppose my blog keeps turning to things Divine because of the season. My father will be in Armenia through New Year’s helping build homes in the town where my parents grew up. Usually, my family goes together to celebrate Christmas but my parents were concerned about travel safety. They went back and forth between who would go to help and who would stay. My mother, in particular, was torn. She waits all year to visit, I think. But in the end, through some reasoning that wasn’t shared with me, Dad went and Mom is stuck with me :)

Having the family split during this normally family-focused time has me thoughtful. It makes me wonder why loved ones so often wind up far part. It makes me wonder why the world is so big. Does God look down and say, “Why do my people scatter?” Or does He smile and say, “I made them such a big world. It certainly took them long enough to invent the telephone and the Internet so they could finally keep in touch!”

E.J.

Thankful to Forget

Excerpted from the “Mardi Gras 3000 Sourcebook” (which is a free download from www.windstormcreative.com/fandom/mg3ksb.htm):

“Though I’ve lived in America since I was four, I was born near Kapan, Armenia, and while I was a small child, my parents traveled quite a bit. My earliest memories aren’t of the anticipation of the night before Christmas or pony rides at a birthday party but of walking, on hot summer nights on cobblestone streets in Josefov, hand-in-hand with my father, or riding a massive roan-colored horse, my back to my mother’s chest, across what seemed an endless expanse of deep green plains spotted with snow-white stones. It never seemed like we had much money but we had family every where we went. Looking back on those times now, I understand why nothing has seemed to hold my interest for long until game design (which is in itself an “endless expanse”).

“Another early remembrance was of a great clock with many overlapping faces, brilliant colors, arcane symbols and multiple hands which, in my twenty-plus year old memory, seemed to move with incredible and erratic speed. Someone told me it was a “celestial” clock but it wasn’t one of my parents as they never could place where I would have seen such a marvel.

“The Mardi Gras 3000 Terrapyres were formed first in my mind when I began thinking about the MG3K universe and I knew that their opposing race needed to be as ethereal as Terrapyres are grounded. The other race needed to be mysterious, maybe even a little bit scary. I immediately thought of that clock and the word Celestial stuck. But I kept coming back to the clock. Where had I seen it? Who had been with me? Why didn’t my parents remember it? It really haunted me.

“Eventually, what human memory couldn’t supply me, the Internet did: Constructed in 1410 by the clockmaker Mikulas of Kadan in collaboration with Jan Ondrejuv, professor of mathematics and astronomy, the Astronomical Clock is part of the Old Town Hall building in Prague. A wonderful detail of the clock’s face became the image for one of the Celestials’ Outpost cards.”

I have seen these few paragraphs reprinted on no less than a dozen websites. I’m not sure why this glimpse into the flashpoint of the Celestials is so popular but I do know that inspiration can come at any time.

As children we see and hear so many things. What do we remember? My mother once shared with me a moment when I was very young (about two) when she was holding me on her lap and singing to me while we sat and looked out at the vastness of an unbroken sea. She started to cry, silently, tears running down her face and into my hair. She realized that this moment, which to her was so powerful and important, wouldn’t be remembered by her toddler daughter. I was too young.

And I don’t remember the actual event. I only remember being seventeen and her sharing the story with me. I remember the way her voice cracked and she looked away. I remember the image she painted in my mind with the unconditional love and the pure desire and sorrow in her voice.

Or maybe....

Maybe we remember everything. Maybe that day, in my mother’s arms, before the endless sea, on a shore far from home, in a country where we didn’t speak the language, maybe that moment shaped, indelibly, who I am today. Maybe feeling safe in her embrace, maybe knowing the beauty of her singing voice, left a mark not on my memory but on my person, my whole, my soul.

I’ve read that what occurs in the first five years of life shape everything of what a person will be. I’m not sure I believe that entirely as I’ve known so many people who faced such unspeakable hardships when they were very small yet have risen above and beyond that past (though perhaps they were strengthened by it). But what if we are formed by the events that come before we can hold them in our memory? What if, like lines of code, those unremembered moments build our program and create the algorithms that everything else, everything that comes later, that is remembered and achieved, is analyzed with and ruled by? What if who we are is made of not what we remember but what we have “forgotten”?

If you knew it was true, would you draw your infant son into your lap more often? Lay on your belly in the cold grass with your three-year-old and count the ants? Would you turn off the TV and gaze into your child’s eyes, memorize your moment together, even as that moment is making him the man he will grow to be?

The sweetest parts of my life, I suppose, are the parts I have forgotten. And I’d have it no other way.

E.J.

Oh, Heck...

I need to be careful what I blog. First I tell my secrets to the surfing world (instead of to a Chia Pet), then I scare a very loyal MG3K player! I will now post for the record: I do not swear.

At the end of my blog on 11/29, I joked about getting so mad about copyright infringement that I swear. Late last night, I got a very sincere and disappointed email from Julie C. in Los Angeles, California. Julie is an "avid MG3K player" and a "dedicated reader" of my blog, and she was dismayed to read that I swear.

Mind you, Julie, I don’t much mind others swearing, to be really honest, but I don’t myself. I have been known to say “freaking” (as in “This coffee is freaking incredible.”) and “flying fig” (as in “What in the flying fig were you thinking buying that plaid couch?”), but I’m just not a traditional swearing type of grrl. Sorry for my joke.

And, by the way, Julie, I’ve covered some kinda heavy-hitting stuff in my blog, especially for an eleven-year-old. Is your Mom cool with you tuning in? Whatever your answer, thanks for having the conviction to write me about the swearing issue. Keep sharing your opinions. I hear you.

E.J.